An estimated 20m people around the world play the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering.
Photograph: Owen Duffy

It had been a long, hard fight. My opponent and I had been exchanging blows and counter attacks for what seemed like hours, and now we sat, silent and depleted, like two punch-drunk prizefighters awaiting the final round of a gruelling championship bout.

The contest had been well-matched. I’d assembled an army of shrieking apes, giant bipedal mammoths and armour-plated rhinos. My plan was simple: overrun anyone who stood in front of me – brutal, lumbering but ultimately effective.

We were playing Magic: The Gathering, a strategy card game which casts players as powerful mages with the ability to travel across a universe of elaborate fantasy worlds. A typical game sees players summon ferocious creatures, cast potent spells and draw upon the power of mystical artefacts in an effort to vanquish their opponent and claim victory.

Players in Magic: The Gathering build competing decks from their own collections of cards. Photograph: Owen Duffy for the Guardian

The game originated in the early 1990s in the mind of Richard Garfield, at the time a graduate student working towards a PhD in combinatorial mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. A life-long tabletop gamer, he had approached a publisher to pitch an idea for a game about programming robots, only to be told that the company needed something more portable and cheaper to produce.

Magic was Garfield’s response, and it involved one major innovation that set it apart from any game previously released.

Where other card games were sold as a single packaged product, Magic cards would come in randomised packs, a model similar to collectible baseball cards. Particularly powerful cards would be rarer than others, making collecting and trading them as much a part of the experience as actually playing matches. Players would assemble their own decks, with a near-limitless ability to personalise their game and develop their own tactics.

The formula proved to be a lucrative hit for the game’s publisher, Seattle-based Wizards of the Coast. From its release in 1993, Magic grew by word of mouth. Players obsessed over the process of building decks, endlessly hunting for the most effective card combinations and devising a huge range of winning strategies.

Nowadays Magic is played by an estimated 20 million people around the world. It is published in 11 languages, has a thriving tournament scene, a professional league and even recently provided the basis for an episode of South Park.

A recent episode of the cartoon series South Park revolved around Magic: The Gathering.

Its creator has since moved on, and today the man in charge of Magic’s development is Mark Rosewater, an endlessly energetic former television writer. He attributed the game’s popularity to its inherent variety and players’ ability to customise their decks.

“If you compare it to something like Monopoly, every time you play you’re getting a pretty similar experience,” he said. “But what’s neat about Magic is that the game itself keeps changing. It’s about exploring, and you get to constantly rediscover it.”

Rosewater heads Magic’s design team, the group responsible for creating a constant stream of new cards for players to incorporate into their decks. Their work involves coming up not only with new mechanical aspects of the game, but also building new settings for players to do battle in - richly themed worlds filled with conflict and adventure, and populated by a cast of heroes and villains.

“We’re trying to create a world and a set of mechanics which we think match the flavour of that world,” he said.

“One of the things I really believe as a designer is that the mechanics are as much a part of the game’s flavour as the art or the text on a card. When you play the game, I want to figure out what it’s trying to express and make sure that the gameplay itself evokes that emotion.

“For example, we did a set called Innistrad which was set in a gothic horror world and I said: ok, I want you, the player, to be afraid. I want there to be suspense, I want there to be tension, I want you to be worried that at any moment something horrible is going to happen because that’s what goes on in the horror genre.”

A later set, Theros, was heavily influenced by Greek mythology and included gorgons, sea monsters and a pantheon of warring gods.

“In Theros, the idea was that you could become a hero,” Rosewater said.

“You started out as a small nobody, but through trials and tribulations you became someone of great importance. So the gameplay was all about building and accomplishing and achieving something until the point where you have these massive heroes clashing against one another.

“It’s the same game, but the gameplay was totally different.”

Origin stories

Magic’s latest set marks a turning point for the game. Magic Origins focusses on five of the game’s most popular recurring characters – a move that provides a jumping-on point for new players intimidated by over two decades’ worth of accumulated storylines.

Veteran player Luis Scott-Vargas thinks the approach will be good for the game. A highly respected member of the elite circle of professional Magic players, he began playing aged 11.

“It’s a set that’s designed to be interesting to people who have been playing for a long time, but also to people who are new to the game, and I think they’ve done a very good job,” he said.

A member of the successful ChannelFireball pro team, Scott-Vargas treats Magic as seriously as an athlete approaches training. A typical week sees him play for up to 15 hours, and much of the rest of his time is taken up by writing and producing videos about the game.

“To get to the Pro Tour you need to be passionate about Magic,” he said.

“You also have to be very good at analysis, be willing to spend a lot of time practising and have friends you can learn from.”

In the run-up to a competition, Scott-Vargas and his teammates collaborate online, discussing the merits of different cards and strategies. About two weeks beofre an event they’ll congregate in one place and devote every waking hour to the game. When tournament day comes, he can find himself competing against thousands of other participants, and top-level events generate an average of 2.7m views on Twitch and YouTube.

While a card game might not seem the most obvious spectator sport, Scott-Vargas argues that its appeal is easy to understand.

“Part of it is that if you’re a fan of any kind of game or sport, it’s always fun to watch the people who are best at it,” he said. “The other part is that the announcers are informative and entertaining, and someone who isn’t an expert can tune in and get something out of it.

“If you look at video games, there are some that get audiences similar to professional sports. League of Legends gets hundreds of thousands of people watching and millions of people playing, so I think it’s possible for Magic to keep growing.”

Growing the game

Magic’s growth has been one of the biggest success stories in tabletop gaming, and while it is primarily known as face-to-face game, many new players have been drawn in by its digital incarnation – the Duels of the Planeswalkers series of video games. Released on PC, consoles and mobile platforms, they have been credited with exposing the game to a wider audience while providing a gentler learning curve than newcomers might encounter by jumping straight into physical play.

Magic Duels: Origins is the latest in a series of digital games credited with introducing new players to Magic: The Gathering. Photograph: Wizards of the Coast

Another factor has been Friday Night Magic – the weekly organised play programme which sees thousands of games shops around the world organising informal local tournaments and providing players with a reliable source of opponents to test their skills against.

But Magic’s audience hasn’t just been growing: it’s been changing.

Tifa Robles is the founder of the Lady Planeswalkers Society, a group which aims to bring more women into the game. When she started playing in 2010, an estimated 10% of Magic players were female. Now that figure stands at 38%.

“It’s grown a lot in the five years I’ve been playing,” she said. “But the reason I started Lady Planeswalkers was that I do think there are things stopping women participating in organised events.

“Part of it is just pure numbers. If you’re one of the only women in the store, or sometimes the only woman in the store, it can feel really lonely. But I also know that in my own experiences, I’ve encountered a lot of sexism. A lot of it is subtle, and you only really notice it as a woman. People question your ability to play the game for yourself, they ask if you’re there because of a boyfriend, things like that.”

“My husband games as well, and it’s interesting to see the dynamic when we go to an event together. I’m actually a much better Magic player than him, I was a tournament player and he never was, but people assume it must be the other way around. People ask him for advice or for his opinion on things in the Magic community when I’m the one that’s really more involved.”

In recent years, the game’s publishers have attempted to introduce greater diversity within its fictional universe. In 2013 Magic featured its first same-sex couple, the Guardians of Meletis. A more recent set included the game’s first transgender character. A game which has often been seen as the preserve of middle-class white males is in the process of becoming a universal pop culture phenomenon.

But while Magic’s ascent has been impressive, it isn’t the only game in town. Other card games – physical and digital – have been able to establish themselves by addressing some of the most common gripes players have with the game.

One is cost. Cards which perform well in high-level tournaments often increase dramatically in value on the second-hand market, and a top-level competitive deck can run to over $1,000 (£650).

Games such as Netrunner, a deep and compelling cyberpunk game pitting hackers against monolithic corporations, have provided a cheaper alternative by simply releasing cards in complete sets, creating an ever-expanding game while eliminating the need to buy individual cards at inflated prices.

Others, most notably the digital collectible card game Hearthstone, have provided a slicker, simpler alternative to Magic’s online offering, which is only available to Windows users and has struggled for years with a cumbersome user interface. And while Hearthstone doesn’t have a physical equivalent, its developers recently announced that it had accumulated over 30 million active users, overtaking Magic in terms of sheer player numbers.

But while it has some serious competitors, Magic looks unlikely to disappear any time soon. Ultimately, the game’s most valuable asset is its community of players, many of whom base their social lives around the game. For the most part they’re passionate, loyal and keen to bring others into their world.

And once you’re in, believe me, it’s hard to get out.

Magic Origins prerelease events take place at game stores on 11 and 12 July. The set goes on general release on 17 July.